This past year, I’ve been leaning back into my roots as a former kinesiologist and personal trainer because, after seven years working with small and medium-sized business owners, I realized the biggest obstacle to success is the same in both arenas.
Whether you want better health outcomes for your body or stronger results for your business, it all comes down to one thing:
Changing your behavior.
In fitness, if you want to build strength, endurance, or flexibility, you have to move your body in new ways.
In business, it’s no different. If you want to build a stronger business you have to operate differently. And that’s going to take:
- More energy
- More attention
- More discomfort — at least at first
This is why it’s so easy not to change. All the pain and suffering happens now and the rewards come later. Hopefully…
Real change means stepping into uncertainty – into new territory. If you’ve never done a thing before, you don’t know for sure that the effort will pay off.
And when the process feels painful — physically, mentally, or emotionally — it’s even harder to stick with it if you don’t trust it to get you where you want to go.
What I love about using fitness as an analogy is that everyone has a body. Even if you’ve never been particularly athletic, you can appreciate truths about how the human body works:
- Effort comes before results. But! Your body changes in positive ways after just a few bouts of moderate-intensity exercise! So even if the results aren’t observable right away, positive changes are happening in real time. Keep going.
- Progress is slow, then sudden. Whether we’re talking cellular or professional growth it takes time. A training program won’t instantly make your muscles or your employees stronger. With repeated effort it absolutely will. Set your expectations accordingly.
- Consistency beats intensity over time. High intensity effort has a role to play in improving performance, but if you believe change requires ALL OUT EFFORT ALL THE TIME you are unlikely to do much of it and therefore unlikely to see any results at all. Do what you can, as often as you can and watch your body (or business) transform dramatically.
These strength and conditioning principles translate beautifully to the business change process. And because the human body is of the natural world and not man-made, we can regard the operating systems we observe as fundamental truths, apply them in business, and trust that the painful process of today will lead to bountiful rewards in the future.
Once you start seeing progress — in the gym or in your business — it gets easier! Not only have you gotten better (faster, stronger, smarter), but now you have proof that the process works. And that’s the ultimate motivation to keep going.
And it’s all uphill… or downhill… (whichever one is the good one) from there.
Bottom line: Trust the process. Whether you’re building muscle or building a business, the principles are the same. New results require new behaviours that will feel uncomfortable at first but not forever.